As the World Turns On Its TV

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I noticed patterns in the way each country related to telenovelas, and, at the same time, the way in which a country’s relationship to telenovelas revealed something unique about it. To paraphrase Canadian researcher Denise Bombardier, give me a telenovela and I’ll give you a nation. In general terms, however, telenovelas plumb what the critic Tomás López-Pumarejo called “the drama of the subconscious.” They are stories that revolve around such ontological questions as “Where is my son?” or “Where is my love?”

Telenovelas explore a country’s social tensions and convert them into collective therapy. This process worked well in countries that had recently emerged from communism, where people were casting about in a psychological search to deal with the long-dominating class taboos. As a result, a drama centered on the impossibility of love because of social or economic obstacles was extremely powerful. U.S. programs Dallas and Dynasty were broadcast in Russia at the same time as Los Ricos También Lloran, but they never generated quite the same level of interest, because Russians could not identify with the problems of an oil millionaire in Texas. The higher production quality of those programs seemed immaterial, so telenovela producers focused on the story. It was the drama, the emotions worn on the sleeve, that gave telenovelas a special attraction.

The telenovela’s power of persuasion is well-documented: Simplemente María (Simply Maria), about a servant who triumphed in life by buying a sewing machine and taking night classes, led to a massive jump in the purchase of sewing machines in Peru; in Cáceres, Spain, they put up a monument to the character. Sales of blond hair dye increase in countries where the principal actress in a telenovela is light-haired; a significant number of Russian children are named after telenovela actors or characters. In Hungary a foundation was started to aid blind people as a result of Esmeralda, the story of a beautiful blind woman.

Telenovelas have helped generate other positive initiatives, such as campaigns in Africa that use the form to raise consciousness about AIDS and drug addiction. The telenovela is ultimately a commercial product, however, and as such, it obeys commercial—not altruistic—interests. For decades, the alliance between Mexican television giant Televisa and the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party led to a bonanza for the production company in return for programming more soap operas with no political content during times of political tension. As the most effective commercial vehicle ever created, the telenovela can be a great demagogic tool.

The final stop of the institute was Cuba, the birthplace of the Latin American soap opera. In Cuba in the 1940s, the narrative tradition of the radio was at its richest and the format of the telenovela was quickly adopted. Also, in the early ’50s, Cuba had more televisions per capita than other Latin American countries, rivaling the United States. In 1948 the radio predecessor of the first Latin American telenovela was launched: El Derecho de Nacer, about a white man raised by a black woman, and his search for his biological mother. The theme of racial tensions—of particular interest to the multiracial Cuban society—was quickly accepted by the rest of Latin America. El Derecho de Nacer has been remade as a film and several times as a telenovela.

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